China

The two main innovations in the Participatory Budgeting process in China contains two parts: first, it creates a “all people vote” system in a non-electoral society. Second, it brings the People’s Congress into the process, which is usually called “rubber stamp” in the political system. These two innovations can represent the development of Chinese participatory process, from authoritarian consultative to participatory democracy (or direct democracy).

Institutional Arrangements

Haikou Model has been adopted both at the street-level and community-level which allows the citizens to participate in decision-making about their collective life. Haikou City implemented this model in 2016 for the first time, the relative strength of the city and district executive officials play a role in encouraging this procedure. It is instituted with a strong community autonomy and participation framework. The pilot experiment has been implemented in two streets and 13 communities, covering 140,000 people. For individuals, they can both make proposal and vote on these two levels. It tends to lead the citizens to think more about the city as a unity, not their own backyard. The projects have two categories, construction projects, and service-oriented projects, the first one, cover the expenses related to the capital establishment or innovation of facilities and the latter can provide more diverse services to ​the community lives. Haikou PB also allows young students in the school to join in the whole process. In the second round of Haikou PB (2017-2018), it expands to four streets and incorporated community-based social organizations (CSOs) to propose for their projects. In order to win, those organizations need to perform their expertise and get to know people’s real voice. Also, it encourages citizens to mobilize into associations. This year (2018-2019) Haikou experiment consists of four streets and expands to townships for the first time. Each township gets 300,000 RMB and the total amount of allocated money is 2,250,000 RMB. One thing should deserve much attention is Haikou PB still used for a small proportion of municipal budgets and it hasn’t been institutionalized with the law or other administrative regulations.

Theoretically, the development of PB in China represents a more accountable and more responsive authoritarian government. But when implemented in practice, the outcomes may be paralyzing. For current situations, PB in China maintains a great diversity and it may continue to evolve with the trend of community autonomy.

Diversity

To begin with, PB itself shows much diversity worldwide. China isn’t the exception in this adaptive characteristic; rather it is unique in the way inside one country there are many different categories. For the central government, it has no accurate policy advocating on the PB practice. But still, the central government wants its local agents to be adjustable to local conditions.

Community Autonomy

From Wenling to Haikou, Chinese PB has gone through a process originated from open budget to community autonomy. Based on these years’ practice, PB in China may continue to be connected with community autonomy way.

Dissemination

When tracing individual PB case in China, each hasn’t maintained for a long time. The most long-lasting has been Wenling Model that started in 2005 and many years after, this model hasn’t been spread to any other city. It is because the government’s willingness plays a crucial role in the dissemination process. Sometimes, when innovative leaders are gone, the whole process will be forced into an end. And none of them can make this practice into law or administrative regulations. Second, compared to other countries, China lacks the official acknowledge from the central government, which is the major support for bureaucracy motive. The Haikou model has been disseminating to Nanchang City and Soochow City mainly because the promoters have personal ties with local officials. It also means in the absence of central government’s promotion, the connection between local governments can’t be cut at all. PB itself shows great flexibility which is also the reason why it can exist in an authoritarian regime. To conclude, PB in China may continue to be diverse and will be combined with the community autonomy, gradually, it will disseminate to more cities and rural areas.

To draw generalizable lessons from China’s PB experiences, we must come to realize the specific background of Chinese politics. Second, despite the merits of participatory democracy or the benefits of practice in direct decision and deliberation gained in the PB process, there are some limitations need to be known.

The Chinese Reform Puzzle

Over the last four decades since the open up and reform policy, China has experimented with some controlled political reforms. These years they are been called governance innovations lead by the authoritarian government but promote participation and democracy unintentionally. China is a particularly important case that some scholars name it as “deliberative authoritarian”. Along this way, there are democratic promoters work on reform politics, from the direct election on the leader of the township (1998) to individual candidates come out to campaign for themselves (2006, 2011) in People’s Congress Election. China has five layers of government: central, province, city, county and township. Each level replicates the entire suite with the central level. Reform often develop at the local level, where civil society can work together with the local government. PB is such an example. Residents want to get more information and rights on budget problems and the local officials try to be more responsive. Under this condition, some scholars and non-governmental organizations (the World and China Institute) began to offer PB as a professional solution. PB in China started early but haven’t grown fast or got popular.

The Problems in China’s Participatory Budgeting

The political context directly influences the practical experiences of China’s PB. These shortcomings are also the future direction for development. To begin with, the willingness for local governments is doubted in some places. Like what we mentioned before, there are “PB like” approaches (eg. Chengdu City) in China. They may have a discussing platform for residents to talk about the projects but in the end, local officials still choose what they want. They are even not consultative because these local officials barely listen. In other places, local officials complain about the voting results if they are not their favorite ones. Second, the Chinese method of motivation may hurt the process of PB. As a post-communist state, China remains highly efficient in encouraging residents to achieve administrative goals. It is good when comes to inspire participation, but it goes too far. PB is used as campaign-style policy enforcement thus it gets much too high turnout and proposals. This may exhaust residents and give great ​pressure to community staff; it adds more burden to them and diminishes the benefits PB has brought to them. It may also be the reason why PB cannot persist in one place for a long time. Third, the PB process appears superficial in the procedure. For one reason, local governments get used to the way of dealing with political tasks and thus ignore the real meaning of PB which is to get more people involved in real participation. Also, China’s bureaucracy is composed of two parallels, the party, and state, so in practice, officials hold the party position as well. Thus, it makes the PB process get intertwined with the party stuff which leads to unnecessary competition from different governments. In this way, all innovations, PB included, not to serve as a purpose to cultivate civil society and individual citizens but to act as a strengthening to the rule of the country.